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The Parent’s Supervised Driving Program to Improve Teen Driver Safety

The premise is simple: Parents have tremendous influence on teen driving behavior, particularly during the required supervised driving phase of the driver’s training process. A recent study from the AAA Foundation found that parents are lacking the resources, knowledge and strategies to provide the optimal driving guidance to their teens.

Despite their best intentions, parents do not always:

a) model best driving behavior themselves b) supervise teens in a variety of driving conditions and circumstances c) stick with active teaching long enough for their teens to learn “higher order” skills such as looking ahead, detecting dangers, or anticipating the actions of other drivers.

As a consequence teens are too often ill prepared for the variety of conditions they face. This results in teens making poor decisions once the license is granted and they are driving alone, without supervision.

The Parent’s Supervised Driving Program addresses these needs with a clear, step-by-step sequence of lessons created by the nation’s leading driver education experts. The Program reflects the best practices for learning basic, as well as higher order, driving skills.

The Program offers a mobile app called RoadReadyTM as part of its national effort to reduce teen crashes. RoadReady offers parents a tool to log the time they spend teaching their permitted teen to drive. Optimized for iOS7, RoadReady tracks logged drive times against the state Graduated Drivers Licensing (GDL) requirement for parents and teens to drive together for 30-70 hours before teens receive their driver’s license. RoadReady’s functionality offers parents an easy, efficient way to guarantee their teen receives the most experience behind-the-wheel, including allowing parents to:

Log teen Learner’s Permit driving time automatically with GPS

Manually enter previous drives

Monitor progress against state requirements

Log-in from multiple devices

Track multiple drivers

Record road type, weather conditions and distance

Export and print a driving log

Access suggestions for teaching safe driving practices

Receive badges for driving accomplishments

RoadReady also offers a distraction-free supervised driving experience – users can put the phone away while driving and resume the app experience once they park.

The Parent’s Supervised Driving Program is sponsorship supported and currently provided by DMV and state partners' licensing agencies to every teen learner's permit recipient at no cost to the state or to the parents.